**Commissioned by the American Composers Forum New England with support from the Argosy Foundation Contemporary Music Fund and the Thomas R. and Ruth R. McMullin Fund

Gil Rose, 2008 Artistic Director

Sonic Boom. This September the eyes and ears of the new music world turn to Boston. Led by Gil Rose, the city's legendary ensembles and rising stars burst into the spotlight for four days of sonic splendor in an iconic 21st-century space.

Co-produced by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston

The first in a series of biennial festivals of contemporary music initiated by the Alice M. Ditson Fund, which supports music by emerging American composers. Also with generous support from the Boston Musicians' Association

News and Press

Boston, Massachusetts, is home to a tremendous amount of new music and composers. This fall Boston’s new music ensembles joined together at the new Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) concert hall for a four-day festival. The Ditson Festival of Contemporary Music ran September 18-21 and featured eight cutting-edge concerts, with seven world premieres, supplemented by multimedia works, visual art collaborations, and special events.

On Sunday, the Ditson Festival of Contemporary Music’s last pair of concerts at the ICA began with two people and finished with over sixty, in a glass box on the harbor. The former were Matt Haimovitz, on cello, and Geoff Burleson, on (and in) piano. Children standing on the postmodern boardwalk outside pressed their faces against the window as Burleson hit keys with one hand and reached in with the other to pluck at the piano’s viscera, as Augusta Read Thomas’s Cantos for Slava (2008) required.

The Institute of Contemporary Art continues to push boundaries in its fall lineup of performances, and this year a lot of these boundaries are musical.

“The artistic goal of our performing arts program is to present to Boston the full range of what artists are doing across disciplines,” says David Henry, the ICA’s director of programs. “For the first year and a half we highlighted dance. But you cannot ignore music.”